A Time To Kill Sociology
Few movies address the issue of race and the death penalty head on, but A Time to Kill is one. The movie opens by portraying two blazingly drunk, confederate flag totting young men driving a pickup truck around a small Mississippi town. They see a young, black girl walking home carrying a bag of groceries. One of the men flings a beer can at the young girl’s groceries beginning a stream of heinous crimes perpetrated against the girl. The girl is found alive shortly after the attack, raped and with ligature marks around her neck from an attempt to hang her. The girl is able to identify the men and they are promptly arrested. Mick Haller is a young lawyer from the same small town. He is trying to cement his place in law with a law office he
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The case seems to be plummeting out of reach for Mick until a change in momentum occurs when the cop Lee shot takes the stand. During questioning, Mick, on the advice from Carl Lee, asks if the cop believes Lee should be put in jail for his crime. The cop responds adamantly no, purposing he would have done the same given the situation. The other witnesses that were crucial to the case were the psychiatrists. The prosecution psychiatrist stated that Lee was not sane at the time of the crime but his testimony was undermined by the fact that he had never stated any person was insane in the fifty plus cases he testified for. The defense psychiatrist argued that Lee was insane during the time of the crime. His downfall was that, when he was 22 years old, he had been convicted of statutory rape and lied under oath. The night before the trial is set to end, Mickey Mouse, who on multiple occasions had leaked Ku Klux Klan information to the public, went with two fellow Ku Klux Klan members and kidnapped Mick’s assistant Ellen. At the same time Mick, feeling defeated went to have a heart-to-heart with Lee. Lee reminded him that Mick was a part of the dominant, white society, and that before he could convince a jury of his innocence, he needed to not see the difference between himself and Lee. There needed to not be a white and black but simply a desire for
The case seems to be plummeting out of reach for Mick until a change in momentum occurs when the cop Lee shot takes the stand. During questioning, Mick, on the advice from Carl Lee, asks if the cop believes Lee should be put in jail for his crime. The cop responds adamantly no, purposing he would have done the same given the situation. The other witnesses that were crucial to the case were the psychiatrists. The prosecution psychiatrist stated that Lee was not sane at the time of the crime but his testimony was undermined by the fact that he had never stated any person was insane in the fifty plus cases he testified for. The defense psychiatrist argued that Lee was insane during the time of the crime. His downfall was that, when he was 22 years old, he had been convicted of statutory rape and lied under oath. The night before the trial is set to end, Mickey Mouse, who on multiple occasions had leaked Ku Klux Klan information to the public, went with two fellow Ku Klux Klan members and kidnapped Mick’s assistant Ellen. At the same time Mick, feeling defeated went to have a heart-to-heart with Lee. Lee reminded him that Mick was a part of the dominant, white society, and that before he could convince a jury of his innocence, he needed to not see the difference between himself and Lee. There needed to not be a white and black but simply a desire for